Paying the price for drug-free MMA

You don’t hear that much about the steroid problem in women’s MMA. You certainly don’t hear much about the steroid problem in the women’s 125-pound division.

Whether that’s because there isn’t one, or if it’s because those problems just aren’t as visually apparent as they might be in some of the men’s divisions, that depends on who you ask.

But for what may very well be the final fight of her career, Rosi Sexton decided she wanted to do something different. That’s why she fired off the email to the Volunteer Anti-Doping Association – VADA, for short – asking what it would take for the organization to implement its exhaustive pre-fight drug-screening regimen before her Oct. 29 flyweight title bout against Sheila Gaff in the U.K.’s Cage Warriors promotion.

“It’s something I’ve been talking about for a while –the whole drug testing situation in mixed martial arts,” Sexton told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “It’s something I felt needed to be addressed. When this fight came up – it’s a possibility that it might be my last fight since I might be retiring after this, or in the near future – I wanted to make a statement.”

That statement, according to Sexton, is that current drug testing protocols in MMA, whether in the men’s division or the women’s, simply aren’t enough. Showing up to events and being tested only on fight night makes it too easy for cheaters to escape detection, she said. If the sport wants to get serious about stamping out performance-enhancing drug use, it needs more.

And more – in every sense of the word, including cost – is exactly what VADA provides.

If you’ve heard of VADA before, chances are you have B.J. Penn to thank for it. The former UFC lightweight brought increased awareness of the organization when he lobbied to have it conduct pre-fight testing for his welterweight bout with Rory MacDonald, which originally was scheduled for UFC 152 in Toronto. The bout since has been moved to the UFC of FOX 5 event in Seattle, but VADA reps said both Penn and MacDonald have committed to undergoing the testing for eight weeks leading up to the bout. According to VADA president Dr. Margaret Goodman, that testing will be about as exhaustive as it gets.

“When you’re testing only at a fight, the fighter knows when they’re going to be tested,” Goodman said. “That’s part of the problem. That’s the problem the athletic commissions have, is they have only a finite exposure to the athlete when they have them on the premises.”

When fighters sign up for VADA testing, they don’t know what tests they’ll be subject to, when, or how many. They’re required to inform the organization of their whereabouts for each day during the eight-week testing period, and are given as little notice as possible before being asked to provide a blood or urine sample, according to Goodman.

“Basically, they’ll get a phone call from a doping collection officer who will be where they are within an hour, maybe even half an hour,” she said. “We’ve had doping collection officers show up at somebody’s place within 15 minutes, so they don’t get any advanced notification.”

Again, it’s exhaustive, but it’s also expensive. Goodman said the testing for each fight will cost “around $6,000,” though she declined to give an exact figure since it might give hints as to which tests the organization will conduct and how many there will be. It’s a figure that might be feasible to two fighters at the top of a UFC card, but to Sexton, it’s a different story.

“I still work a day job,” she pointed out.

To defray the cost, Sexton started an online campaign to raise the money through GoFundMe.com, and so far she’s received a little over $1,600 in donations. When she asked MMAjunkie.com medical columnist Dr. Johnny Benjamin to get the word out via Twitter, he noticed that contributions were tricking in slowly and decided to help the process along, he said. He did that by writing a check for half the total cost of the testing and sending it straight to VADA, which he described as “the best drug-monitoring agency out there.”

“They are aggressive in their testing and don’t play favorites with fighters, promoters or [state athletic commissions],” he said. “They stay neutral and out of the shenanigans as best I can tell.”

That’s fine by Nevada State Athletic Commission Executive Director Keith Kizer, who said he sees outside drug testing agencies such as VADA as “complementary” to commission testing.

“The way I see it, the more testing, the better,” said Kizer, who added that his main concern is getting the right testing done the right way, and not getting caught up in the competition between third-party testing organizations that he said are too often guilty of spreading misinformation in an attempt to promote their own brand.

“The one criticism I’ve had – and I’m not shy about it with both VADA and [the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency] – is that they come out and make these crazy statements trying to beat each other out for that supplemental dollar. I don’t need to go out and beg promoters to use our drug-testing system. You want to do business [in Nevada], you’re doing the drug tests that I say you’re going to do.”

But even on the subject of which tests to do and when, there is considerable debate.

For instance, VADA recently sent out a release calling on all professional sports to include carbon-isotope-ratio testing as part of its standard battery of tests. The CIR test can detect the presence of synthetic testosterone even in athletes whose testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio is not higher than the allowable limit – thus making it more effective at catching testosterone cheats who are adept at timing their dosage to trick conventional tests, according to Goodman.

Currently, the NSAC employs CIR testing only after a fighter has tested positive for elevated T/E ratios. Adding CIR testing as a matter of routine for all drug screenings would have a dramatic impact on the total cost of fight-night testing, Kizer said.

“That money, even though it comes out of the promoter’s pocket, in reality probably comes out of the fighters’ purses,” he added.

For instance, testing all 20 fighters on a typical UFC fight card in Las Vegas currently costs about $4,000, paid by the event promoter.

“You take that $4,000 and start doing carbon-isotope-ratio tests in addition to all the other testing – because you’re not just going to do the CIR, since then you’d miss a lot of other things – then instead of being able to test 20 fighters, you’re talking, what, maybe four?” Kizer said. “I’d rather test 20 fighters than four.”

It comes down to whether you want testing done in volume, or whether you want it done with an exhaustive thoroughness. VADA has the luxury of testing fewer fighters and concentrating more resources on them. Even then, the current cost threatens to make the entire process prohibitively expensive for most MMA fighters, and Goodman knows it.

“I couldn’t agree more [that] fighters should not have to bear the cost of this at all,” she said. “To do what we really should do and to accomplish what an organization like this should accomplish, you need some sort of funding.”

The hard part is figuring out where that funding might come from. The UFC hasn’t expressed much enthusiasm about forking over the kind of money that VADA requires. Even the Penn-MacDonald testing agreement was nearly nixed over VADA’s refusal to withhold results until after the fight, once both promoter and fighter have already been paid. (According to Goodman, results for the Penn-MacDonald testing will be made available to the state commission, the UFC, and both fighters “as soon as it’s available to us.”)

Goodman speaks hopefully of the possibility of outside sponsorship, but stuff like carbon-isotope-ratio testing isn’t quite as appealing to corporate backers as a logo on the UFC’s canvas might be, and Goodman knows it. There’s always the possibility of a mutually beneficial research arrangement. In Las Vegas, the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health offers free MRIs to fighters who need them for licensing purposes, in exchange for their participation in a long-term brain study. But then, Goodman has yet to identify any similar scenario that might work for VADA.

“I’m not saying Nike should come out and pay for this,” Goodman said. “It is important for them to put their money toward sponsoring athletes, but it’s also important for them to sponsor clean athletes. Maybe companies out there that have an interest in promoting clean sport will want to be a part of this.”

For now, the financial burden still falls on fighters such as Sexton who want the increased testing enough to pay for it. Her opponent has been cooperative in agreeing to undergo the VADA testing, she said, but seems less enthusiastic about raising the money. Sexton has her own reasons for pushing for it so vigorously, and a lot of it has to do with how she felt the night she tied up with Brazilian fighter Carina Damm at a BodogFIGHT even in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2006.

“I had a feeling at the time that something was not quite right,” Sexton said. “When you get ahold of somebody, you know, you train with people, women and guys, and you get a sense of what natural strength feels like. Then you get a sense of what, perhaps, artificially enhanced strength feels like.”

Sexton won that fight via first-round submission, and she kept her suspicions about Damm to herself. Two years later, when Damm tested positive for the steroid nandrolone after a victory in Los Angeles, Sexton said it “didn’t really come as a surprise to a few of us in the division.”

“That’s what put it on my radar,” she said. “I think for women’s MMA in general, it is an issue. We saw that with the [Cristiane] “Cyborg” [Santos] situation. I think you could make the argument that it’s more of an issue for the women than the men because the difference between a woman who’s taking steroids and a woman who isn’t is potentially greater than the difference between a man who’s taking steroids and a man who isn’t. I think we saw that with ‘Cyborg,’ where she was clearly competing against opponents who weren’t even in the same league as her as far as strength and power.”

For Sexton, getting the right testing done is worth the extra money and the added hassle. Not only does she want to know that she’s fighting an opponent who’s all-natural, she wants her fans and her peers to know that she’s competing clean as well. And is willing to prove it. Beyond that, there’s also a safety issue, Sexton said.

“It’s the same way that you have blood testing to make sure there’s no danger to either fighter from blood-borne diseases or anything like that,” she said. “Steroid testing is on the same level. If you’ve got one fighter who is artificially enhancing their strength, that massively increases the risk of serious injury to the other fighter.”

She’ll get no argument from either VADA or state-run athletic commissions. As Kizer put it, “I think the one thing all these organizations agree on is that the goal is deterrence.”

It’s how far they’re willing to go to accomplish it, and what they’re willing to spend in the process, that still separate them.

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